🔧 Useful

Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.

Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.

Searches the web for actual sound files by keyword, in a layout untouched since roughly 2003. Still the fastest route to a duck quack.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

A preservation project that has rescued more than a hundred thousand Flash games and animations from deletion, all playable.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.

Animated bar chart races, scrollytelling and story maps built from a spreadsheet without writing any code.

Books you a silent video call with a stranger who also needs to work, which turns out to be startlingly effective.

Variable font sandbox where you drag the axes and watch weight, width and optical size move in real time.

Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

Native speakers pronouncing individual words in hundreds of languages, for when a phonetic spelling is not enough.

Properly licensed free downloads curated by radio stations, which is how you stop losing your videos to copyright claims.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

A shelf of room-code party games — spy, drawing, word association, trivia — all free, all in one place, none needing an app.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.

Curated wall of the best-designed sites on the internet, filterable by type and updated relentlessly.

Good news with a nudge attached — every story arrives alongside something you could actually do about it.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.

Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.

Vector halftone generator that rebuilds an image out of dots, lines or waves and exports it as clean SVG.

Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.

Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.

Tells you exactly when the space station will pass over your garden, and which direction to look.

Placeholder text made of artisanal nonsense, optionally cut with real Latin for clients who prefer not to notice.

Tens of thousands of hosted model demos, each running in a browser tab. The closest thing machine learning has to an arcade.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

Merge, split, compress, rotate, sign and convert PDFs from a single page. Covers nearly everything Acrobat charges a subscription for.

The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.

Every meme template with the text boxes already in the right places, and no watermark once you find the setting.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.